Patrick deWitt's 'The Sisters Brothers' is a violent, humorous and fast-paced read: New in Paperback

Patrick deWitt's gold-rush Western, The Sisters Brothers, drew comparisons last year to Charles Portis' "True Grit." But with its surprising violence, humor and picaresque story, deWitt's novel reminded me more of Quentin Tarantino's films and Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." Like Tarantino, deWitt knows that attitude makes blood funny; like Twain, he understands a reader's willingness to forgive a good narrator's personal flaws.

Ecco, 336 pp., $14.99

Narrated by Eli Sisters, the younger of two hired killers, the novel moves from Oregon City to San Francisco in 1851 as the pair chase their latest quarry. The meandering trip is marked with drink and death, and as people are introduced and quickly dispatched, I soon lost track of the body count.

DeWitt's handling of his characters keeps the novel from devolving into a gory mess. For Charlie, the colder of the two brothers, bullets make a powerful enough statement in an argument. Eli, more soulful, is occasionally troubled by the morality of their enterprise -- he would rather run a general store.

The novel is a marvel of pacing; short chapters keep the story moving through the end, where deWitt still manages to surprise as everything goes "black and wrong as could be imagined" and becomes "death in one or the other way."

1861

Adam Goodheart (Vintage, 496 pp.)

$16

Goodheart directs Washington College's C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, but he solidified his national profile as a columnist for The New York Times' series of column about the Civil War, "Disunion."

Here, subtitling his book "The Civil War Awakening," he examines the events directing the first year of the war, arguing, "Eighteen sixty-one, like 1776, was -- and still is -- not just a year, but an idea."

Where most accounts of the months leading up to the war "focus tightly on the parallel dramas in Charleston and Washington, as the clocks ticked away the last opportunities for peace," Goodheart's attention also turns to Manhattan, Boston, Ohio villages and Virginia slave cabins "to consider people and ideas that were migrating from the Old World to the New."

As he explains, "1861" tells "a story foreshadowing things to come. It is not a Civil War saga of hallowed battlefields drenched in blood, much less of which general's cavalry came charging over which hill. It is a story, rather, of a moment in our country's history when almost everything hung in the balance."

In the Boston Globe, David Shribman praised Goodheart for finding a niche in the flood of books coming out of the Civil War's 150th anniversary. With so much ground and angles already covered by Bruce Catton, Doris Kearns Goodwin and document-based, first-person accounts in the Library of America's "Told by Those Who Live It" series, Shribman found that "Goodheart has produced an idiosyncratic volume that tells us everything about that first year but frames events in a distinctly new way. It's as if Picasso and Braque put together an account of the War Between the States. Goodheart is, for want of a better term, a cubist; he takes what is known, breaks it down to its elemental parts and rearranges it, giving us a different view entirely of something we thought we understood entirely."

"Hardly a page of this book," Shribman went on to say, "lacks an insight of importance or a fact that beguiles the reader. Here we learn that enslaved humans had a monetary value greater than all the nation's factories and railways combined, a sobering reminder why the South clung so long to its immoral holdings. And that 40 percent of the Union combatants came from the Midwest. And that only 29 of the 16,000 privates in the U.S. Army defected to the Confederates, while more than 300 of the approximately 1,000 officers did so."

The result is a text that "shows us that even at 150 years' distance there are new voices, and new stories, to be heard about the Civil War, and that together they can have real meaning."

Goodheart will be speaking at Hathaway Brown School in Shaker Heights on Wednesday, March 7, from 7 to 8:30 p.m. as part of the school's Learning for Life Speakers' Series. The event is free and open to the public. For more information, contact kosborne@hb.edu.

The Patrick Melrose Novels

Edward St. Aubyn (Picador, 688 pp.)

$20

Through four novels collected here ("Never Mind," "Bad News," "Some Hope" and "Mother's Milk"), St. Aubyn has chronicled the life of Patrick Melrose. The publication of this anthology coincides with the recent release of "At Last," supposedly the final novel of the series.

For its focus on horrible life experiences -- sadistic parents, drug binges, addiction, recovery, adultery and assisted suicide -- the series of stories here are surprisingly funny. Taken together, these episodes of Melrose's life seems to offer more punishments than Dante's "Inferno," but St. Aubyn keeps things from being decidedly grim with a quick wit and a mocking tone.

In The New York Times, Francine Prose found that the Melrose novels "can be read as the navigational charts of a mariner desperate not to end up in the wretched harbor from which he embarked on a voyage that has led in and out of heroin addiction, alcoholism, marital infidelity and a range of behaviors for which the term 'self-destructive' is the mildest of euphemisms."

Prose acknowledged that such a summary fails to capture the magic of St. Aubyn's work, making it "sound like yet another account of grisly domestic dysfunction, brightened by copious infusions of lively table talk and British-American high-society glamour."

In pointing out that St. Aubyn's "books are at once extremely dark and extremely funny," Prose went on to note, "In order to understand what makes these novels so exceptional, it's better to open any one of them at random, marveling at the precise observations and glistening turns of phrase, not to mention dialogue witty enough to make our own most clever conversations sound like" words of "jaw-dropping idiocy, petty snobbishness and blinkered self-involvement."

King of Capital

David Carey and John E. Morris (Crown, 400 pp.)

$16

Carey and Morris, financial journalists from The Deal and Dow Jones respectively, capture "The Remarkable Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Steve Schwarzman and Blackstone," the private-equity firm Schwarzman founded with Pete Peterson in 1985. One of the world's largest businesses of its kind, Blackstone turned its co-founders into billionaires and survived the latest recession with a strong foundation still in place.

The authors follow the model of other recent books examining how institutions have weathered (or failed in) the recent financial crisis -- offering explanations and a layout of financial markets and products in layman's terms. "King of Capital," however, presents a picture of a financial institution that differs greatly from what people may have seen in J.C. Chandor's film "Margin Call" or read in Michael Lewis' " The Big Short" and Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera's "All the Devils Are Here."

The Economist observed that "King of Capital" offers "a lucid explanation of how the debt markets evolved from junk bonds to securitized loans, changing the types of deals that private-equity firms were able to finance."

Nonetheless, the magazine's reviewer said, "the book only really takes off about two-thirds of the way through," and that for all its analysis, it "does not shed much light on the 'king of capital' himself."

In The Financial Times, Henny Sender noted that while Carey and Morris "had impressive access both to Schwarzman and his partners, and quote generously from them" to give the book "insiderish insights," the authors "do not sacrifice objectivity for that access."

In its aspirations to be "a serious portrait of Blackstone and the way that Schwarzman so brilliantly built it up, scoring numerous coups along the way and avoiding the mistakes of many competitors," Sender found that the book "does a fine job in what it sets out to do."

Still, Sender acknowledged that "the book lacks both the drama and the significance of so many other recent financial books. That is not because it is not well-researched, well-written and comprehensive -- it is all those things. The drawback is the subject matter itself."

Three Stages of Amazement

Carol Edgarian (Scribner, 320 pp.)

$16

Fans of Mona Simpson's "My Hollywood" should turn to Edgarian's San Francisco-set novel, which homes in on Lena Rusch and her husband, Charlie Pepper. While the story is one of privileged lives, its opening lines also make clear that this is decidedly a book of the recent economic and political moment:

"The modern marriage has two states, plateau and precipice, and in the winter of our recent crisis -- with markets plummeting and even rich folks crying poor; with the dark reign of one tinsel president finally ending, and the promised hope of a new man about to start; yes, with hope rising like a cockamamie kite and fear more common that love -- Charlie Pepper forgot his wife."

When the two first become a couple, they are "as ordinary as any two people wanting more." Now, Lena struggles at home with her young son, a premature baby and a marriage that seems to have faded but not completely withered. Charles focuses strictly on his business, which crumbled in the 2008 market crash. Desperate for cash, he finds help with Lena's uncle, but he has to work to keep the partnership a secret.

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Malena Watrous approached Edgarian's novel with the notion that "it's hard to feel sorry for the superrich, even (maybe especially) when they lose a lot of money." Nevertheless, she praised the novel's exploration of "what occurs when expectations don't deliver and entitlement gives way to disappointment." Watrous found that "Edgarian dips gracefully into different points of view, enlarging the scope of the story, which becomes about a community of interconnected people as much as it's about the individuals who make it up."

In Edgarian's refusal to "ridicule them or their sorrows," Watrous found that "the fall from privilege is both humbling and humanizing. Rich or poor, disappointment is part of growing up, learning to accept a less-than-perfect outcome, to tolerate ambiguity. In the end, these are just people living their lives, struggling to get by like the rest of us.

In The New York Times, Janet Maslin noted that "Three Stages of Amazement" "shares a surprising amount of common ground with" Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom," though Edgarian works "in half the space, with less loftiness but more soap-operatic plot tricks."

In both books, Maslin said that it is "the sharply observed detail and intensity that matter: the spectacle of high-strung, hot-blooded, restless people conflating their own private crises with the political and economic turmoil of their times."

As the book goes on, Maslin felt that "things become disappointingly perfunctory" and that "too many broad, convenient, Lena-friendly strokes of fate shape the book's final pages."

With that caveat, though, Maslin still called "Three Stages of Amazement" a "fiery, deeply involving book with an eccentric streak that keeps it constantly surprising." Edgarian, Maslin concluded, will remind the reader of Jennifer Egan and Amy Bloom, as like them, she demonstrates a "fearless capacity for surgical precision."

High on the Hog

Bloomsbury, 304 pp.

Jessica B. Harris

$17

Harris, a culinary historian and professor at Queens College, City University of New York, subtitles her history, "A Culinary Journey From Africa to America."

She explains that after spending more than three decades "writing about the food of African Americans and how it connects with other cuisines in the hemisphere and around the world," she knows that "the food of the African continent and its American diaspora continues to remain a culinary unknown for most folks."

Harris explains that while the African-American culinary traditions are often tied to enslavement and "perceived as unhealthy, inelegant, and hopelessly out of sync with the culinary canons that define healthy eating today," they have "marked the food of this country more than any other culture."

While some foods come down to us from slave-cabin stoves, Harris points out that "for centuries, black hands have tended pots, fed babies, and worked in the kitchens of the country's wealthiest and healthiest."

In The Plain Dealer, reviewer Scott Stephens called Harris's culinary history a "rambling but often fascinating history of African-American cuisine."

Stephens commended the way Harris honors unsung culinary heroes while "doing justice to the food -- from the rations consumed by the cabin slaves to those eaten in the 'Big House.' "

But, Stephens concluded, "Like many good meals, 'High on the Hog' is both delicious and a bit of a mess. The book has trouble deciding what it wants to be: memoir, social history or food nonfiction. It also lingers too long on such overly familiar staples as W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington."

Such flaws, Stephens said, don't take away from the fact that Harris's stories are "as satisfying as a smothered pork chop."

Vikas Turakhia is a critic and teacher at Orange High School in Pepper Pike, Ohio.

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